Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Proposal: Prenominal Adjectives in Japanese

在Richard K博士的指导下，Larson，Hiroko Yamakido女士将为她的博士论文收集数据。她的研究涉及日语的方言变异，重点是形容词的屈折变化。她将研究从日本北方到南部的七个县的方言，包括北海道、福岛（或新泻）、大坂、京都、广岛、福冈和鹿儿岛。该项目的核心数据将通过与母语人士的口头访谈来收集，他们将就涉及形容词的例句和短语的可接受性和含义范围进行咨询。这些形容词包括那些在英语例子中表现出友好性的形容词，如“老朋友”（可以表示“年长的朋友”或“长期的朋友”），以及在上下文中发现的形容词，如结果（“玛丽把金属锤平”），使役（“玛丽让约翰快乐”），状语（“玛丽说得很快”），以及所谓的次要谓语结构（“玛丽生吃了鱼”）。Yamakido女士还将参考仅在相关地区和几位日本方言学家中可用的出版资料。她的田野调查结果将影响日语前置形容词的性质：它们是投射到定语结构（如“blue house”）还是投射到关系从句结构（如“house that is blue”），这一研究对生成句法和语义理论，特别是日语方言学都具有重要意义。它不仅将促进对日语语法的理解，以及其形态和句法形式之间的关系;它还将展示语法的一个小部分内的丰富多样性和跨方言比较的重要性。

Under the direction of Dr. Richard K. Larson, Ms. Hiroko Yamakido will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research concerns dialect variation in Japanese, with focus on adjectival inflection. She will study the variants spoken in seven prefectures that extend from northern to southern Japan, including Hokkaido, Fukushima (or Niigata), Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Kagoshima. The project's core data will be gathered though oral interviews with native speakers, who will be consulted regarding the acceptability and range of meanings of example sentences and phrases involving adjectives. The adjectives include those showing the amibuity in English examples like "OLD friend" (which can mean 'aged friend' or 'long-time friend'), as well as adjectives found in contexts like resultatives ("Mary hammered the metal FLAT"), causatives ("Mary made John HAPPY"), adverbials ("Mary spoke QUICK-ly"), and so-called secondary predicate constructions ("Mary ate the fish RAW"). Ms. Yamakido will also consult published sources available only in the relevant locales and several Japanese dialectologists. The results of her fieldwork will bear on the nature of prenominal adjectives in Japanese: whether they are projected into attributive structures (like "blue house") or into relative clause structures (like "house that is blue").This research is significant both for theories of generative syntax and semantics generally, and for Japanese dialectology in particular. It will not only advance understanding of Japanese grammar, and the relation between its morphological and syntactic forms; it will also demonstrate the rich diversity within a small sector of the grammar and the importance of cross-dialectal comparison.